Retro vertigo

In a time dominated by the push for new technology, new content and up-to-the-minute reactions, deference to and longing for something that's truly new, never before seen or heard, haunts Retromania. In his epilogue Reynolds lists songs and albums that once seemed to offer something of the future—the list moves from Donna Summer's stretched-out disco groundbreaker "I Feel Love" through 1983's Into Battle with the Art of Noise and into Aaliyah's baby-assisted 1998 track "Are You That Somebody?"—and writes, half in order to provoke and half because he actually wants to know, "This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?"